


When I Close My Eyes

by bagog



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Hospitalization, Hurt/Comfort, Physical Disability, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 08:18:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17721548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bagog/pseuds/bagog
Summary: Shepard is badly hurt after taking control of the Reapers and setting them all to self-destruct. The events have left her scarred, mind and body. Over the course of her recovery, she is kept company by Joker, the one person who's been with her from the start.





	When I Close My Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Full credit for the story idea goes to Amako. Hopefully I did justice to the great art.

When she closed her eyes, she could still see it: the blinding white flash, the electrical arcs like sparks shooting through her brain. It was like her arms were on fire again; she could feel the heat on her face.

She’d seen footage of the moment from other perspectives, and she tried to think about that as much as possible. Her therapist had told her she should concentrate on _those_ visions, those feelings.

Helmet cam of an Alliance soldier in London, sounds of screaming all around as a Reaper capital ship reached down from the cloud cover like a massive hand come to crush the resistance forces beneath its fingers. The horrible scree of its main canon sizzling through the air and reducing a building to fire and brimstone—and then, suddenly the screams turned to cheers. The Reaper seized up, flashed white, a crack splitting it down its center, and an explosion that lifted the dust off the ground. The Reaper rained to the earth in so many pieces of twisted metal.

Recorded footage from Illium—streets over-run with husks, a banshee bearing down on a small encampment of biotic resistance fighters. The flash and electric air from their biotics twisting together against the banshee’s power. Her horrible cry, and the way she lashed out, her long fingers like daggers, her eyes jet black. And then, the husks fell over. The circuitry that seemed to run through their bodies ignited, and they turned to dust. The banshee didn’t have time to utter a single scream before wrenching at an awkward angle and collapsing to the ground, tangled limbs burning.

The story told by a shaman on Tuchanka—since the war, turned into a holo-novel—the deserts of the barren planet, Reapers dropping out of the sky. The warriors had moved to the open desert to draw the fighting away from the colonies. The shimmering air as a blue wave seemed to careen through the atmosphere and cascade against the bodies of the Reapers. Each ship exploding in turn, pieces of them falling through the atmosphere like a star shower. And then nothing but the silence of the desert as the winds buried the carcasses of the eternal machines.

Shepard would sometimes sit for hours at a time, attempting the meditation techniques her therapist had taught her, letting these other images drift through her mind and replace the searing pain and blinding light in the Crucible.

It didn’t always work.

When she first came to after the Battle of London and the horrible journey through the slipstream, and the flash and the explosion, Shepard couldn’t see at all. The surge from the Crucible had overloaded the VI and circuitry in her body, eyes included. The doctors told her that, given the damage to her face, even if she had had her natural eyes, they would’ve been blinded in the explosion.

As if that was some kind of comfort.

And so, for weeks, she waited in darkness for new eyes to be grown for her. She could only see in her dreams, and then, only ever dreams of the Crucible. Since she had gotten her eyes back, she had been practicing seeing things in a different way: the way the shadows creeped across the wall of her hospital room, the smiles of the nurses who came to change the bandages on her face. She noticed when they stopped wincing at the sight of her, and tried to decide if it was a sign that she was starting to heal, or that they had become accustomed to it. Every day was a chance to replace old memories with new ones.

++

It was a long time before the Normandy returned to Earth, and so Shepard was alone day after day. Of course there were the Alliance officials coming in to congratulate or debrief her, but the doctors kept all that to a minimum, and Shepard was grateful.

“Good morning, Admiral,” said the day nurse, walking in. “We have a patient who’s been insisting on seeing you since we brought him in, and we’re afraid he’s going to break himself if he doesn’t get a chance.” He stepped out of the room and helped another nurse wheel a hospital bed into the room.

It took her a moment to recognize him through her own blurry eyes:

It was Joker.

Joker’s body was strung up in casts, what skin was visible was badly bruised, and he was hard to recognize without his cap. But he was smiling. Grinning ear to ear. Shepard had never seen him grin like that, maybe the closest he’d come was seeing Shepard for the first time after Shepard had woken up on the slab in a Cerberus base.

The staff wheeled Joker over so his bed was head-to-foot with Shepard’s and locked it down.

“Joker,” her voice croaked. She could have almost cried. The two nurses gave her a smile and left the two of them alone. “What the hell are you doing in this hospital?”

“What can I say?” Joker sounded weak, “The amenities listed on the extranet were too good to pass up. Worth breaking every bone in my body.”

“That really—“ Shepard began to cough and cleared her throat. “That really puts the pressure on me to be good company.”

“Well, if they would’ve told me that _Admiral_ Shepard would be gracing the establishment, maybe I would’ve worn something a little classier. But you gotta love these hospital gowns: so breathable. So much ventilation. So many chances for people to see my ass.”

“You’d have to be able to stand, first,” Shepard chuckled, the feeling of laughing making her ache in a way that felt new and foreign.

“Once all the king’s horses and all the king’s men get done with me, maybe I’ll show it off a little. First peek goes to you, though, of course.”

“Pass,” Shepard guffawed.

“Am I gonna get court martialed for talking to you like that? Shit, guess I’ll blame it on the pain-killers.”

“I don’t think the room is bugged, and my lips are sealed.”

“Good. That’d kinda be the definition of adding insult to injury.”

“Glad to see it hasn’t dampened your spirit.”

“Yeah, guess you should’ve seen my spirit a couple weeks ago. It was damp, alright.”

Shepard smiled broadly.

“I get back from a mission that almost kills me, and you’re ready to snark me to death. I wake up from the dead, and there you are in Cerberus colors waiting for me. No matter what happens to me, you’re always the first friendly face I see, you know that, Joker?”

There was that grin again.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

++

The bandages had come off Shepard’s face. The skin regrowth treatment left her face and hands (all the way up to the elbows, actually) baby-soft and incredibly pale. Even so, her face was still a mass of scars and she barely recognized herself when she looked in the mirror. The reconstructive surgery had been top notch, given the limited resources in the hospital after the war. It had been a long spate of painful surgeries, though, as the doctors rebuilt her face and regrew the muscle tissue.

She was waking up at five AM, again, and the doctors told her this was a good sign—getting back into her old routine. She only told her therapist that, most mornings, she woke up from another nightmare about the Citadel. That she would lie awake at night with her eyes open until she passed out from exhaustion, afraid to close her eyes for the searing pain she’d feel in all that beautiful new skin. Before, the pain had felt like a phantom, but now that she had working nerves in her hands and face again, it was as if they remembered the trauma for her.

These days, her biggest ache was in her legs. Ever since being revived by Cerberus, her reconstructed legs had always hurt—just part of the process that didn’t get finished before Shepard had to be woken up. The explosion had shattered her legs again, and no matter how much she tried to hide it from the orderlies helping her into her wheelchair, she winced whenever they went to move her legs.

So, early in the morning, she would be wheeled into the hospital atrium with its fountain and its grove of trees, its grass and the towering glass ceiling that let in the morning light.

Joker met her there every morning, and Shepard didn’t ask him what was getting him up at five in the morning. They would sit side by side in their wheelchairs and watch the pink of the sky through the ceiling.

Most mornings, they sat and talked about the good old days: Saren, the Collectors. Well, not ‘good days’ exactly. This morning, though, they found themselves caught up with the present, unexpectedly.

“I’ve been trying to talk to someone about the Normandy, the past few days. Gotten a couple scattered reports of what happened once we set down in London.”

“Once you got on the Citadel, things got pretty harried pretty quick. We lost so many ships in the initial push, we were scattered when it came time to cover you. Once the Citadel started powering up, we all pulled back to the Relay. Reapers didn’t even bother chasing us. Then the Citadel let out this massive energy surge. Never seen anything like it. Caught up with us at light speed.” He cast his gaze down, “Tried to keep ahead of it. Pushed the Normandy past her limits. Didn’t matter much.”

“Yeah,” Shepard nodded. “I heard a little bit about that from Dr. Chakwas.”

“In that case, you know we crash landed. Hard. Not my finest moment.”

“Everyone I’ve talked to says you put it down pretty soft, considering the circumstances.”

“Not everyone’s got brittle bones.”

“Touché.”

“Chakwas managed to stabilize me the whole way back. Spent most of it sedated, I guess. I don’t remember much before waking up in the hospital and… well, demanding to see you, basically.”

More people were trickling into the atrium, now, hospital staff taking a break on the park benches or orderlies pushing wheelchairs up next to the fountain or next to some of the trees.

“I’m glad you’re safe, Joker.” Shepard looked up, out the glass in the ceiling of the atrium, the pink bands of sunrise were becoming blue. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you. You’ve been with me since the beginning.”

“I’m always gonna be there,” Joker said. Then stammered: “Admiral.”

“When I was up in the Citadel… I could barely walk. Could hardly see. Was trying to push, to see the mission through. For some reason, though, my mind kept going back to everything I’d been through with this crew. Hell of a time to start getting nostalgic.”

“Glad to know that only the _best_ parts of your life flashed before your eyes.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Shepard grew quiet. “I’ve got a lot I’m thankful for. I’m grateful to be alive. I’m thankful you’re here.”

The slightest tinge of pink appeared on Joker’s cheek.

“What, umm. What happened up there?” Joker adjusted the brim of his cap, cast a sidelong look at Shepard.

“There was this boy… this hologram of a boy,” Shepard began after a moment. She looked at her hands, the skin tender and pale compared to her chest, her legs. “It was what was in control of the Reapers. Their ultimate intelligence or something. They knew about the Crucible, it was almost like they wanted me use it.”

“Huh,” Joker scoffed. “Bet nobody expected the ageless race of sentient killer robots to have a death wish.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Shepard said, maybe a bit too forceful. After all, it would probably be good to joke about it. Still, the smile slid from Joker’s face and he folded his hands in front of him. “He— _it_ offered me three choices. I could use the Crucible to… to destroy the Reapers. Or I could do what the Illusive Man had wanted to do and control them.” She bit her lip, shook her head slowly. “I remember being so mad! So mad that after everything, the Illusive Man was right. We _could_ control the Reapers. Our biggest threat could be our biggest ally.”

“Yeah, I mean,” Joker sat up a bit, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day, right? Old glowing-eyes-cigarette-man had to be right eventually.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Shepard looked out at the atrium, the sun was starting to filter through the glass roof, the angles acting as prisms which cast rainbows into the sun-dappled corners of the lawn.

“What about the third choice?”

“Join with the Reapers. Fuse all organic and synthetic life together into a new life-form. The ‘ultimate evolution’.”

“Umm, gross.”

Shepard nodded.

“Tempting in the moment, though. Nobody had to die.” _Except me_ , she told herself. “It was the upshot of everything the Reapers had been trying to do. No more… no more AI uprisings, nobody ever wondering… whether or not they had a _soul_ ever again.”

“Yeah, okay,” Joker sighed. “It’s no ‘chocolate or peanut butter’, but it doesn’t sound like an easy choice. You made the right call, though, destroying the Reapers once and for all.”

“That wasn’t the choice I made.” She could barely hear her own whisper.

“Huh?”

“To destroy the Reapers… the Crucible was designed to wipe out all AI in the universe. Reapers. Geth.” She turned to Joker, “EDI. Everything.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“Leave it to Protheans to go overboard, sheesh.”

“I…” she closed her eyes and saw the horrible flash, felt the searing pain. She opened her eyes again just to confirm her hands weren’t burning. “I took control of the Reapers. Just for a moment… And I set all their cores to self-destruct.”

The sun was beginning to beam down straight through the glass and into the atrium. Joker’s face was hidden in the shadow beneath the brim of his hat.

“What was it like?”

“It was a second that felt like it lasted forever.” Shepard opened her hands, imagined them curling around the control rods aboard the Crucible. “I was everywhere—so many different places at once. I felt connected to every race that had been wiped out. Every cycle the Reapers had harvested,” she shook her head, hated the taste of the word on her tongue, she corrected: “ _Killed._ My hands started to burn, my face started to burn, I could feel my consciousness slipping away and then—I chose to end it all.”

“I can’t even imagine what that must have felt like.” Joker inched closer, put one hand on Shepard’s shoulder. She flinched, but then reached back to take Joker’s hand in hers, if only for a moment. “What made you choose to give all that up?”

No one had asked her this question before. Not her therapist. Not the tribunal that debriefed her. It was a question she barely asked herself.

“I don’t know. I knew what I wanted to do before I ever took hold of that terminal. But once all that power was flowing through me… I don’t know what made me go through with it. What made me let go.”

“Gives the rest of us a lot to live up to,” Joker snickered, placing his hand back on his lap. “Gotta try to live up to be better than omniscience.”

“You’re doing well, so far,” Shepard smirked. Joker turned his head sharply, cleared his throat.

“I promise to never melt your face off, how’s that?”

Shepard laughed and it made her ribs hurt; her face hurt, too. She didn’t care.

“When you _do_ choose to be serious, you can say the sweetest things.”

++

“Come on Shepard! You’ve got this!” Joker cheered from his wheelchair. Shepard gripped at the rails on either side of her, desperately willing her legs to move. “One more step!”

Shepard took one more step.

“Fooled you,” cried Joker, “One MORE step.”

It had been several months, and Shepard and Joker were finally in physical therapy to teach them to walk again. Jeff had been almost jovial about the matter, on the outside at least: “Not my first time learning to walk after a bad fracture, probably won’t be the last.”

Every afternoon, Shepard and Joker were back at the rails, or down at the aquatic calisthenics class, or else just receiving a vigorous massage.

Shepard tried her hardest—she really did—but she stumbled. Her PT caught her arm, and held her up. Joker shot forward in his wheelchair.

“You okay?” His eyebrows were knit together.

“Not my first session, Joker,” Shepard muttered.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Joker wheeled around to the other side of the rails.

Today was one of those days where trying to walk reminded her too much of pulling her body up, dragging herself across a battle field and into the slipstream, limping across the Crucible floor…

Staggering up the ramp to the control interface…

The white flash, the searing heat.

She fell again, caught just before she could collapse completely, and she pulled herself up on the rail as if she were doing a pull-up.

“Almost done, let’s get you righted and then we’ll take a break.” Her PT said, her voice as firm as ever. “Come on, Admiral, pull yourself up. You can take it, this pain is nothing. That’s it.”

When Shepard opened her eyes, there was Joker at the end of the railings, smiling beneath a furrowed brow.

“Think you’ll look back on this as one of the ‘good old days?’” He chuckled.

Shepard grimaced.

“I don’t think I’ll look back on this day much at all.” Still, she took another step towards him.

Finally, it was her turn to sit in her wheelchair and be Joker’s cheerleader. It was something she had taken to, lately, carefully watching the expressions on Jeff’s face as he walked. The mix of pain and determination on his face, the weariness of the same-old-same-old even as he was careening forward off his balance.

Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she would see that beat up cap and Joker’s face underneath, smirking like he swallowed a canary, even as he dragged his feet along the mat.

“Just imagine how good it’s going to feel getting back in the cockpit of the Normandy. Nice leather seat, room with a view, nice big engine core under your boots,” Shepard cheered.

It was clear by this point that Jeff would return to his old form in a few more months, limping as always, but as able as ever. It was also clear that Shepard would never be back to fighting shape. The coarse work of cybernetics and dead tissue and new growth in her legs meant they would never _not_ hurt again. The doctors had told her that walking would be slow, running would be not-recommended, and getting in the field would be absolutely out of the question.

“Hope someone’s keeping it warm for me…” Jeff grunted. He had almost reached the end of the parallel bars and was sweating profusely.

“Almost there, Jeff!” Shepard clapped her hands, “Couple more steps and I’ll take you out dancing.”

“Is that a threat? So help me, I will drop right here.”

++

Shepard closed her eyes.

There was a flash of blinding light, the crackling arcs of charged plasma—

So she opened her eyes. The sun was setting out the window of the care facility, and the sky was a brilliant orange and a deep vermillion. She and Jeff had taken to meeting in the commissary for dinner, now that they could walk about the facility under their own power. Jeff was almost back to himself, but Shepard still used a wheelchair sometimes when her cane didn’t seem to be doing enough for her.

“What’re you thinking about, Jeff?” Shepard watched his face, just a little bit of the old weariness and the ‘not-this-again’ she sometimes still saw at physical therapy written across it. He turned his head but averted his gaze.

“Oh, nothing. It’s embarrassing.”

“Try me.” Shepard scooted closer to Jeff on the couch they shared.

“I was thinking about getting back on the Normandy. I hate being grounded, but… this time around, uh, I haven’t minded so much.” He looked at Shepard from under the brim of his hat.

“I don’t think that’s embarrassing at all.”

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s going to be great to be flying again—“ he hastened to add.

“Duly noted.”

“Alright, your turn, what are you thinking about?”

“Just watching the world go by,” Shepard sighed. “Thinking about a few things my therapist told me.”

“Gotcha. Well, don’t mean to pry anything private out of you, but, are you alright?”

“I’m getting there,” Shepard said. It’s something I haven’t really told anyone,” Shepard sat back. “Well, nobody except my therapist. Whenever I close my eyes I see… the Crucible. I see this flash and I feel all my skin burning off.”

“Shit.”

“It’s not as bad as it used to be.”

“Did your therapist do anything to help you with that?”

“Yeah, I close my eyes and I try to picture all those other scenes that I’m supposed to. The Reapers dying and the people cheering, all that kind of stuff.”

Joker nodded.

“Well that sounds like a real nightmare,” he sighed, leaned back against the sofa, brought his coffee to his lips.

“Which part?”

“The whole thing, I guess.”

“It means I’ve watched a lot of footage of the end of the war. A lot of smiling and cheering people.”

“All cheering for you.” Joker set his coffee down, “They may not have known it then, but they sure know it, now.”

“Yeah, somehow—when it gets really bad—that doesn’t help me too much to think about.”

Then Jeff took her hand.

“None of us would be here without you, Shepard. That’s a fact.”

“Thanks, Jeff.”

“And I guess… well, I mean, it’s sorta no-big-deal compared to saving the universe but… you’re the reason being grounded and going through all this PT bullshit again has been…” He seemed to be struggling over his words. “Bearable. _Good._ ” He shook his head. “I don’t know, it eats me up to know you’re hurting.”

Shepard laced her fingers together with Joker’s.

“That means a lot to me, Jeff.”

++

Tonight was the night: the one year anniversary of the Battle of London and the end of the Reaper war.

Shepard and Jeff had both been released from the care facility, and had decided to attend the festivities. Well, that wasn’t quite right, they’d chosen to sit in a park at a safe distance from the crowd and watch the fireworks once the sun went down.

Admiral Shepard had tried on her new uniform yesterday, tailored for her new, more gaunt physique.

“Hope those Admiral’s bars don’t feel too heavy on your shoulders there, Shepard!” Jeff had teased. It felt to Shepard a lot like going home—the idea of taking command of the Normandy once again. At the same time, she felt a sense of nostalgia for the last year of her life. It was a feeling she couldn’t exactly pinpoint, this sense that ‘things would be different, now.’ She slowly came to realize she’d miss the PT, the dinners in the commissary, early mornings in the hospital atrium.

“Can’t believe we’re back on the Normandy tomorrow,” Jeff said, easing himself down onto the blanket they’d brought. “Even if it is just a goodwill tour, still means I’m back in the saddle.”

“You’re only excited because _you_ won’t have to give any speeches.” Shepard winced a bit as she kneeled to the ground, set her cane beside her on the blanket.

“Better than fighting Reapers.”

“But I was _good_ at fighting Reapers,” Shepard chuckled.

“You’re basically the biggest badass in the galaxy,” Jeff scoffed. “How hard can it be to be a diplomat?”

“Guess you’ll be there to see.”

“I’ve got nowhere else to be.” Jeff adjusted the brim of his cap, “No place I’d rather be, anyway.”

The fireworks started then. _Flash_ —a red palm. _Flash_ —a green peony. The explosions echoed over the city, and Shepard could hear people cheering in the distance. Suddenly, Jeff’s hand was on hers.

“Is this going to bother you?”

“No,” Shepard smiled, “This is alright. More than alright.”

The sky crackled and boomed overhead. Jeff leaned in, Shepard tilted her chin. There was a moment where they shared a breath between them, and Shepard closed her eyes, her lips pressed against Jeff’s. The kiss was a tender thing, and it felt so natural, as if the two had been kissing each other their whole lives. She let her hand rest on Joker’s face, deepening the kiss. Jeff leaned forward after her as she pulled away, and when she opened her eyes, there was that beautiful grin.

They didn’t say anything: there was nothing else to say. Jeff scooched closer to her on the blanket and leaned his head against her shoulder, and Shepard squeezed his hand tighter.

When Shepard closed her eyes, she saw a flash, she felt a burn. But instead, she focused on the vision of fireworks exploding behind her eyes, the burn becoming the feel of Jeff’s kiss on her lips.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, thank you so much for reading. I really hope you enjoyed it, some.


End file.
